A mini media blitz on boys & men

Radio, pod, oped, live radio: something for all tastes

Photo by Juliana Romão on Unsplash

Sometimes a bunch of things happen on the same day. Today is one of those days on the media front. It’s all a great sign that the issues of boys and men are being taken more seriously, and in an constructive, non-zero-sum way. Choose your poison! And do help spread the word!

1. “Men are having a health crisis. Why aren’t we paying attention?”

My opinion piece in the Washington Post argues that we’re neglecting men’s health to a dangerous degree, including in terms of public policy. For more evidence on this front, see AIBM’s paper “Six Facts on Men’s Health”. Here are a few snippets from my oped:

Women’s health is promoted through several official bodies, including offices on women’s health in the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and the NIH, as well as the White House Gender Policy Council. These public offices help maintain a focus on women’s health issues within the policymaking apparatus. Without similar institutions focused on men’s health, an asymmetry has developed.

One obvious step forward is the creation of a federal office on men’s health, as proposed in a House bill introduced by Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.), along with 14 co-sponsors. Payne, who died in April at 65 from complications related to diabetes, was also founder and co-chair of the Men’s Health Caucus.

Gender equality is not a zero-sum game. As Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy says: “I would not choose between my son and my daughter, and I would not accept that as a choice that any of us should make. … We’ve got to do both.”

The value of gender-specific health-care research and policy has been proved by the work of women; it is now time to apply it to men.

I know, it’s an odd time to be arguing for movement in Congress. But I’m hoping that enough people can be alerted to the problem so that the Bill has some hope in the next session.

2. “Where do different ideas of masculinity fit into the presidential election?”

This was a great conversation on NPR’s Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep, whose reporting I admire. It’s a 6-minute listen, mostly focused on the cultural and political aspects of the debate over masculinity.

Some of the key points I tried to convey included:

• the failure of the political right to have any substance to offer in terms of actually tackling the many challenges facing men. (Of note, not a single Republican signed on to the Bill for an Office of Men’s Health).

• the failure of the political left to acknowledge the reality of those challenges, or sometimes even to admit positive aspects of masculinity. “There are some good things about masculinity, but the Left struggles to say that” was my comment.

• young men are turning away from the left more than towards the right

• there’s no evidence for a retreat on attitudes towards gender equality, including among young men (see my piece with Allen Downey on this “No, young men are not turning away from gender equality”)

• as a result, many young men especially feel “politically homeless”

I wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal along the same lines “On the ballot: American manhood” icymi.

3. Why are fewer and fewer men enrolling in college?

I was delighted to take part in an in-depth discussion on men in college on NPR’s IA along with Jon Marcus, senior higher education reporter for The Hechinger Report and Shaun Harper, executive director, Race and Equity Center Harper USC, hosted by Jenn White.

It was great conversation, grounded in facts and with some optimism mixed in, without avoiding the tough questions. (I was also delighted that Shaun cited AIBM’s brand new research paper, “HBCUs at a Crossroads: Addressing the Decline in Black Male Enrollment”).

4. “The Men — and Boys — Are Not Alright” (Ezra Klein Show)

Last but not least, a re-run of the very best conversation I’ve had on this subject, the one with Ezra Klein of the New York Times. As he said in his intro:

We recently did an episode on the strange new gender politics that have emerged in the 2024 election. But we only briefly touched on the social and economic changes that underlie this new politics — the very real ways boys and men have been falling behind.

In March 2023, though, we dedicated a whole episode to that subject. Our guest was Richard Reeves, the author of the 2022 book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It,” who recently founded the American Institute for Boys and Men to develop solutions for the gender gap he describes in his research. He argues that you can’t understand inequality in America today without understanding the specific challenges facing men and boys. And I would add that there’s no way to fully understand the politics of this election without understanding that, either. So we’re rerunning this episode, because Reeves’s insights on this feel more relevant than ever.

This interview has a special relevance to me, because it was part way through that the American Institute for Boys and Men was in fact created; of course, at that point, only in my head. Here’s the exchange that was a pivotal moment in me deciding to leave Brookings and found a whole new organization. Ezra and I were discussing the way that Covid-19 had impacted men and women, and what kind of attention those impacts were getting. Here’s what I said:

There are thousands of people whose job it is to get up every morning and write about that, and think, how will this affect women and girls? And they did a good job of it. There were a lot of reports. And of course, the reports meant they got lots of coverage. But there were just no equivalent reports saying, well, hold on, what’s happening to men here? And particularly, this greater vulnerability to death just wasn’t getting very much attention.

I’m not blaming anybody for that. I’m just saying that there just aren’t any institutions whose job it is to draw attention to that fact. That institutional asymmetry I think does create a problem down the line because it means that someone’s going to talk about that. And those people who are talking about that are going to be people on the internet who will then use the fact that mainstream institutions are not talking about it as evidence that you don’t care about boys and men, that you’ve fallen into a feminist conspiracy.

I thought a lot about that institutional gap after talking to Ezra. Eventually, it led me here, to found the American Institute for Boys and Men: